The trial of John Demjanjuk, the 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp, resumed Tuesday in Munich.

Prosecutors blamed Demjanjuk for playing an active role in the Nazis’ machinery of destruction as they read the indictment against the retired autoworker, saying he was a willing follower of Hitler's racist ideology.

Holocaust survivors meanwhile accused Demjanjuk of exaggerating his health problems to try to derail the trial.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, said Tuesday that he hopes “the German courts prevent Demjanjuk from derailing the prosecution by portraying himself as more ill than he is.”

When asked whether he believed suggestions that Demjanjuk might be the last person to be tried for Holocaust-related crimes, Zuroff, who was observing the trial in Munich, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review that he will “definitely not” be the last one.

“There is a trial currently underway currently in Aachen and hopefully two more in Hungary in the next couple of months,” Zuroff said in a phone interview.

Demjanjuk, who was deported from the United States in May to stand trial in Germany, rejects the charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor death camp, saying he has been mistaken for someone else.

The retired autoworker suffers from several medical problems and was wheeled into the Munich state court on a gurney Tuesday, slightly propped up lying on his back. He arrived much the same way Monday, the day the trial began.

Demjanjuk kept his eyes closed as the 10-page indictment was read by prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz. He showed little reaction, but put his left hand to his brow as Lutz detailed how Jews were stripped of their belongings and clothes, then led naked into the gas chambers of Sobibor.

‘Willingly participated’

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk maintains that he was a Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans, and spent most of the rest of the war in prison camps. But Lutz told the five-judge panel that he would seek to prove Demjanjuk had volunteered to serve the Nazis once he was captured, and that he was a willing participant in the Holocaust.

Lutz told the court that Demjanjuk learned how to be a guard at the SS training camp at Trawniki and was then posted to the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in March 1943. “As a guard, he took part in all the various parts of the extermination process after the deportation trains arrived,” Lutz said, reading the indictment.

The prosecutor said Demjanjuk could have deserted, but chose to stay in the camp. “He willingly participated in the killing of the Jews because he wanted them dead for his own racist ideological reasons,” Lutz said.

Germany’s Der Spiegel reported earlier that the Germans were aware seven or eight years ago of Demjanjuk’s role as a guard at Sobibor, calling it a case of “missed opportunity.” Commenting on whether the Demjanjuk case represented an opportunity lost, Zuroff said, “The Germans were well aware, but they had until recently a policy of not seeking extradition and prosecution of non-Germans.”

In 2007, the Simon Wiesenthal Center gave the German government a “failing” grade on its efforts to bring Holocaust-related criminals to justice. In both 2008 and 2009, however, it gave a “B” grade to the Germans.

Commenting on the defendant’s courtroom appearance and referring to an earlier quote, Zuroff said that Demjanjuk should have gone to Hollywood “but took a detour to Sobibor.”

Zuroff, who is frequently referred to as the top Nazi hunter, said it is a label he is proud to wear. “It only helps to explain what I do,” he added.

If convicted, Demjanjuk faces a possible 15 years in prison. Court sessions in the trial are scheduled through next May.

hurriyetdailynews.com